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DeepSeek OCR

github.com

11–20 of 252 posts

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#11
post #10
post #8

The paper is more interesting than just another VLM for OCR, they start talking about compression and stuff. E.g. there is this quote >Our work represents an initial exploration into the boundaries of vision-text compression, investigating how many vision tokens are required to decode text tokens. The preliminary results are encouraging: DeepSeek-OCR achieves near-lossless OCR compression at approximately 10× ratios,…

LLMs are compute heavy with quadratic scaling (in compute) per tokens. They are trying to compress text tokens into visual tokens with their VLM. Maybe they would render texts to an image before tokenizing to reduce the compute cost.

But naively wouldn't you expect the representation of a piece of text in terms of vision tokens to be roughly the same number of bits (or more) than the representation as textual token? You're changing representation sure, but that by itself doesn't give you any compute advantages unless there is some sparsity/compressability you can take advantage of in the domain you transform to right?

So I guess my question is where is the juice being squeezed from, why does the vision token representation end up being more efficient than text tokens.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#12

Looks great, but looking at the benchmark, can’t help but think about how crazy good dots-ocr is as a model. Too bad they’re not as open as the Deepseek team because its so crazy good and would love to know how it was trained.

If you look you'd notice that it's the same Haoran Wei behind DeepSeek-OCR and GOT-OCR2.0 :p

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#13
It's interesting how they use "Gundam" in their variant names. I gather that Gundam-M and Gundam are their most powerful ones.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are compute heavy with quadratic scaling (in compute) per tokens. They are trying to compress text tokens into visual tokens with their VLM. Maybe they would render texts to an image before tokenizing to reduce the compute cost.

But naively wouldn't you expect the representation of a piece of text in terms of vision tokens to be roughly the same number of bits (or more) than the representation as textual token? You're changing representation sure, but that by itself doesn't give you any compute advantages unless there is some sparsity/compressability you can take advantage of in the domain you transform to right? So I guess my question is wh…

Vision tokens are a good compression medium because with one vision token you have one vector of N elements, but with textual tokens you have M vectors of N elements, because one vision token represent multiple pixels (and possibly multiple words). This is why its a good compression medium for compute.

It will never be as precise as textual tokens but it can be really good as they show in the paper.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#15

Looks great, but looking at the benchmark, can’t help but think about how crazy good dots-ocr is as a model. Too bad they’re not as open as the Deepseek team because its so crazy good and would love to know how it was trained.

Did we read the same graph? DeepSeek Gundam 200 dpi appeared to get similar perf as dots-ocr, but with less tokens needed. The x axis is inverted, descending with distance from the origin.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are compute heavy with quadratic scaling (in compute) per tokens. They are trying to compress text tokens into visual tokens with their VLM. Maybe they would render texts to an image before tokenizing to reduce the compute cost.

But naively wouldn't you expect the representation of a piece of text in terms of vision tokens to be roughly the same number of bits (or more) than the representation as textual token? You're changing representation sure, but that by itself doesn't give you any compute advantages unless there is some sparsity/compressability you can take advantage of in the domain you transform to right? So I guess my question is wh…

I wonder if text written using chinese characters is more compatible with such vision centric compression than latin text.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#20
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are compute heavy with quadratic scaling (in compute) per tokens. They are trying to compress text tokens into visual tokens with their VLM. Maybe they would render texts to an image before tokenizing to reduce the compute cost.

But naively wouldn't you expect the representation of a piece of text in terms of vision tokens to be roughly the same number of bits (or more) than the representation as textual token? You're changing representation sure, but that by itself doesn't give you any compute advantages unless there is some sparsity/compressability you can take advantage of in the domain you transform to right? So I guess my question is wh…

Vision is how humans see text. So text must have built in adaptations to protect from visual noise. For example, two words that look similar must never appear in similar contexts, or else they would be conflated. Hence we can safely reduce such words to the same token. Or something like that.
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